THE ERLICH-ALTER CASE & SOLIDARITY

...Stalin, no longer fearing imminent military defeat, once more turned his attention to the question of the future political complexion of the countries on the Soviet Western frontier...

...We, for our part, want to make use of them in order to establish contacts with Poland...

...But if the events of 1956, 1970, and 1980-81 are any indication, the country's present rulers should beware of overconfidence...

...Erlich and Alter, along with many other Polish political leaders, were quickly rounded up by the NKVD...

...Citing the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927, they concluded: "All the chief United Nations have sins on their conscience like the Erlich-Alter case...

...Stalin, who undoubtedly had final say on the decision to reveal Erlich's and Alter's deaths, simply assumed that in the aftermath of the battle of Stalingrad the fate of two Jewish socialists would have little effect on Soviet relations with its allies...

...Erlich and Alter became non-persons (although there was one article published in Poland, shortly after Khrushchev's "de-Stalinization" speech to the Soviet Communist party's 20th Congress in 1956, calling for the posthumous rehabilitation of the Bund's leaders...

...Poland was the key to his plans for the postwar settlement...

...But Erlich's and Alter's position was growing more precarious daily...

...The letter turned out to be the last he was ever able to send to them...

...The emergence of Solidarity, Victor Erlich believes, cheated Stalin of his victory...

...Stalin, desperate for military aid from the West, mended as many fences as he could with old adversaries, including the London-based Polish government-in-exile...

...The Germans attacked the Soviet Union on June 22...

...Erlich suggested to his wife that she prepare to leave Montreal...

...Victor Erlich argues that Stalin, "for all his cynicism, did not discount the power of ideas...

...In response to a letter from William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, Litvinov announced that Erlich and Alter had been executed the previous December...

...As a goodwill gesture he arranged a general amnesty for Polish political prisoners in the U.S.S.R...

...It would be misleading to claim that Henryk Erlich's and Victor Alter's legacy, in a direct sense, goes marching on in Poland today...

...Two weeks after their initial expression of outrage, the editors of the New Republic significantly softened their earlier protest, cautioning Litvinov dated the executions as taking place in December 1942...

...They never returned...

...But Stalin, who sent the Red Army into eastern Poland later that month, had his own plans for the region's political future...

...Not only that, they were now approached by their former jailers and asked to organize an international committee to mobilize Jewish public opinion and financial resources in the West to aid the Soviet war effort...

...Erlich was the more steady, cautious leader, standing somewhat to the left-of-center in the Bund's internal debates but always valuing the unity of the movement over sharp ideological distinctions...

...Stalin may have had another show trial in mind, similar to the spectacles of the late 1930s that claimed the lives of so many old Bolsheviks...

...In meetings with Soviet officials they drew up plans for a Jewish antifascist committee, with Erlich slated to serve as chairman and Alter as secretary...

...President Roosevelt and Vice-President Wallace, the supreme arbiters of liberal opinion in 1943, remained silent about the Erlich-Alter executions, unwilling to take a stand that might jeopardize the fragile anti-Hitler coalition...

...Alter was the more flamboyant leader, more volatile in personal style, and a more restless thinker...

...Erlich and Alter were outspoken opponents of the Bolsheviks' suppression of democratic rights in Russia...

...Despite protest meetings organized by some prominent union leaders in the United States, within a few weeks the Erlich-Alter affair dropped out of the headlines...

...The Red Army, caught by surprise, fell back in disorder...

...They complemented each other well in leadership...

...OVER THE NEXT TWO DECADES, Erlich and Alter became well-known political leaders in Poland...

...This is because they hope to use our connections in America...

...Erlich and Alter had to be killed because they were spokesmen and symbols for an alternative vision of what a socialist Poland could look like...

...Erlich, writing to his family after his release in 228 September 1941, told them of this period: "I prepared myself for the worst (I never viewed death as the worst) and tried to gather my forces, to marshal all the strength to resist I could muster . . . I thought that I must leave to you an unsullied name and this bolstered my conviction that I would hold out...

...As the New Republic now saw things, they "should neither praise the Soviet Union uncritically nor scream against it," since the former would turn them into apologists for crimes like the Erlich-Alter execution, and the latter would lend ammunition to those who hoped to use anti-Soviet sentiments to push through a reactionary agenda in American foreign and domestic policies...

...Both sacrificed comfortable careers—Erlich had been trained as a lawyer and Alter as an engineer—to devote their lives to the hard-pressed Jewish labor movement...

...The heroism of the Soviet resistance to nazism was admirable, but had not changed the undemocratic character of Stalin's regime...

...Erlich and Alter, like the 1944 insurgents, and like the members of the now suppressed Solidarity movement, knew what it meant "to sacrifice for values more precious than life...

...In 1943 Soviet authorities probably did not expect their grotesque accusation against Erlich and Alter to be believed...

...The two Bund leaders, according to Litvinov, had used their brief period of freedom in 1941 to undermine Soviet resistance to the Nazis by appealing to Red Army soldiers "to stop bloodshed and immediately [make] peace with Germany...

...It was his first opportunity to write to them since his arrest in 1939 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police (Erlich's wife and two sons managed to escape from Nazi- and Soviet-occupied Poland and find refuge in North America in the interim...

...The NKVD representatives dance attendance upon us," Erlich wrote to Bund leaders in New York in September...

...As a leader of the Bund organization in Poland and Russia and as its representative in the Central Committee of the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic party, he had faced constant harassment by the Czar's secret police, and was arrested four times between 1902 and 1911...

...Victor Erlich, Henryk Erlich's younger son (who is now a professor of Russian literature at Yale University), told 1 The word "socialism" has suffered in Polish esteem from its long association with the Soviet model...

...When the Czar was overthrown in the revolution of February 1917 Erlich was elected one of the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet...

...News of their disappearance reached the United States a few weeks later, but nothing more could be learned of their fate until Litvinov's announcement.' In the weeks following Litvinov's announcement, the Erlich-Alter case briefly became a cause cglëbre in the United States—the first time since June 1941 that the Soviet Union came under sustained public criticism from liberals in the West...

...Stalin was not able to kill off these ideas by killing Erlich and Alter...

...In the none too distant future," he wrote in September, "I may find myself in North America, in which case my natural residence will be New York...

...In late November the Red Army captured Rostov and prepared to take the offensive on the Moscow front...

...As Hitler, at the time, was still master of most of Europe, the Soviet Union doing most of the fighting against the Nazis, and the final outcome of the war was as yet still in doubt, it is not surprising that this middle road proved elusive...

...There is no General Jewish Workers' Bund in Poland today, and there are few memories of its existence...

...The Soviet government maintained a grim silence about their fate for the next 14 months, ignoring repeated queries by Western labor and socialist leaders...

...Erlich and Alter, along with many high Soviet officials, were evacuated from Moscow in mid-October, taking up residence in the temporary Soviet capital of Kuibyshev...

...But they also opposed the allied intervention in Russia in 1918-20...

...There was talk of sending Erlich to the United States and Alter to London on goodwill missions...

...Their names were closely linked...

...IN POSTWAR POLAND, the new Communist government saw to it that memories of the earlier democratic socialist tradition, as represented by the Bund and the Polish Socialist party, were suppressed...

...When the Gdansk shipyard workers struck in August 1980, one of their central demands was the construction of a monument honoring their comrades slain in the 1970 strike...

...Both came from well-to-do backgrounds...

...He criticized the fetishism of centralized planning in the Soviet economy, and offered a vision of a transition to socialism in which socialized and private sectors of the economy would coexist for many years...

...Poland is once again ruled by the bayonet...

...He had opposed the Czarist regime as a socialist, as a Jew, and as a Pole: in the spring of 1917 he brought the first resolution before the Petrograd Soviet calling for the establishment of an independent Polish state...

...The movement for workers' rights has been dispersed...

...Both Erlich and Alter took great satisfaction in the Bund's increasing support among almost all sections of the Jewish community: in Poland's last prewar elections, the 1938 city council races, the Bund's candidates won a clear majority of the Jewish vote...

...Just over two months later, on December 4, 1941, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, his close associate in the Bund's leadership, were rearrested...

...In this respect he played a role in the Bund analogous to the one Eugene Debs played in the pre-World War I American socialist movement...

...The New Republic, an enthusiastic advocate of Soviet-American cooperation, declared in March: "The announcement of the deaths of Erlich and Alter should take the scales from our eyes...

...Neither Erlich nor Alter would supply the desired confessions: instead of a public show trial, they were sentenced to die in secret hearings before a military tribunal in July 1941...

...Then, as Erlich reported to his family, the "fantastic" happened...

...From August 1980 through mid-December 1981, Polish workers waged an open (and for a while, it appeared, successful) struggle to reshape the country's political and economic life, moving away from the authoritarianism of the Sovietimposed system into a democratic and independent socialism.' Part of this struggle was the effort to regain control of the nation's past...

...Whatever benefits he could expect to gain in the short run by making use of Erlich's and Alter's prestige would be canceled out in the long run if they were around to challenge his policies in Poland after the war...

...This silence was finally broken in late February 1943 by Maxim Litvinov, Soviet ambassador to the United States...

...But, he added, there are striking similarities between the vision of an independent democratic socialist Poland sought by the Bund in the 1920s and 1930s, and the goals that the Solidarity movement set out to accomplish...

...A photograph reprinted in Lucjan Dobroszycki's and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's photographic history of Jewish life in Poland, Image Before My Eyes, shows Erlich standing erect, distinguished, and conservatively dressed, looking somewhat sadly out over a large crowd gathered at a Bund demonstration in May 1933...

...The Bund's constituency, the three and a half million Jews who lived in Poland between the two world wars, was annihilated in the Holocaust...

...There, shortly after midnight on December 4, they were summoned to a meeting with an NKVD official, ostensibly to discuss plans for the antifascist committee...

...Lech Walesa and most of Solidarity's leaders are devout Catholics who draw their inspiration from the Polish Catholic Church's long struggle for survival under Russian domination...

...Erlich and Alter agreed that the war against Hitler had to take priority over old disputes, though they entertained no illusions about the sudden generosity of their hosts...

...Someday, in a democratic and socialist Poland, the names of Solidarity's leaders—and perhaps of Erlich and Alter— will be honored long after those of Gomulka, Gierek, and Jaruzelski have been forgotten...

...Their jailers wanted them to confess to being Polish spies...

...But, seen from the outside, Solidarity's program of decentralized economic decision-making by workers' councils, and the freer political expression and action bore a striking resemblance to what is known in the West as democratic socialism...

...In mid-September Erlich and Alter suddenly found themselves free men...

...But this was a time when Western politicians, military leaders, businessmen, and editorialists vied with one another to see who could offer the most praise of Soviet military valor...

...229 that the controversy should not be allowed to cast a shadow over future Soviet-American relations...

...The Bund's leaders spent most of the next two years in the Butyrki prison in Moscow, an NKVD interrogation center...

...He believed that such policies, coupled with a militant stand against the powers-that-be, could help mobilize the "inbetween" classes around the working class in the struggle against capitalism...

...Several weeks after his announcement the Soviet Embassy in Washington let it be known that a cable from Moscow had been incorrectly decoded, and that the actual date of Erlich's and Alter's deaths was December 1941...

...In August 1981 large crowds turned out to observe the anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis...

...Alter, a few years younger than Erlich, had also put in a long apprenticeship in the underground struggle, suffering his first arrest at the age of fifteen...

...In October the Germans were halted before Moscow...

...Throughout the 1930s they campaigned for cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies in a common defense against fascism...

...Solidarity, the independent trade union that was at the center of Poland's recent political ferment, distributed leaflets citing the 1944 uprising as evidence that Poles "do not need anyone to give them lessons in . . . what it means to sacrifice for values more precious than life...

...This left liberals in the West with a difficult task...

...Stalin took the long view...

...In the 1930s he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the economic determinism then dominating Marxist thought...

...Forty years ago Henryk Erlich, an internationally famous leader of the General Jewish Workers' Bund, the Jewish socialist party in Poland, wrote these words to his family from Moscow...

...227 me in a recent interview that "it is a fair assumption that Walesa has never heard of Erlich and Alter, and has no knowledge of the Bundist tradition...

...Erlich's interrogation was a matter of high priority, and on one occasion he had the dubious privilege of being questioned by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD...

...What is incredible is the sudden and drastic change in my situation—a shift from a death row cell to Metropole Hotel and red-carpet treatment, from a contemptible charge leveled against me and Victor to the current wooing—all this is altogether fantastic, fairy-tale like...

...What does march on are some of the larger concerns, democracy and independence, with which they were associated...

...Erlich was no stranger to Russian jails...

...When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 and when the Polish government announced that Warsaw would not be defended, they left for eastern Poland to continue the struggle...

...After Lenin's Bolshevik party seized control of the revolution, Erlich left Russia for his native country...